Spiritualized at The Bridgewater Hall

Led by J Spaceman, legendary British space rock band Spiritualized bring their latest album, Everything Was Beautiful, to the acoustically perfect surrounds of The Bridgewater Hall.

While some people imploded in the lockdowns and isolation of the epidemic, others were thriving. “I felt like I’d been in training for this my whole life” said J Spaceman in a text conversation last year. He was referring to his fondness of isolation and when you reframe loneliness as “beautiful solitude” then it isn’t so bad. He would walk through an empty “Roman London” where “even the sirens had stopped singing” and where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness and no con-trails.”

He used the birdsong walks to listen and try and make sense of all the music playing in his head. The mixers and mixes of his new record, a ninth studio album, weren’t working out yet.

Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home. Also, he employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. So, there’s a lot going on.

“There was so much information on it that the slightest move would unbalance it, but going around in circles is important to me. Not like you’re spiralling out of control but you’re going around and around and on each revolution, you hold onto the good each time. Sure, you get mistakes as well, but you hold on to some of those too and that’s how you kind of… achieve. Well, you get there.”

Eventually, the mixes got there and Spiritualized latest album was achieved.